If practice makes perfect, the Lebanon City Council should have perfected by now the city-manager search process. But even if there’s no such thing as perfection in this realm, the council now has an opportunity to rectify some flaws that marred its last manager search.

As staff writer Tim Camerato reported last week, the council’s Governance Committee is beginning to outline the process to be followed in finding a replacement for Dennis Luttrell, who lasted all of six months on the job. He was fired without a public explanation last March following a performance review. It’s not clear why councilors waited 10 months before beginning to look for a successor, but the apparent lack of urgency may be explained in part by their confidence in Paula Maville, a longtime city employee who has been filling the job in the interim. Another factor could be that they wanted to get through budget season before turning to the search.

With that said, it would have been highly desirable to have a permanent and proven leader in place when, for example, a much-touted study laying out an ambitious vision for downtown redevelopment was forwarded to the council in October, where it got a chilly reception. So, too, in August, when the council balked at a proposal to develop a business plan for the airport, and again last month, when a hotly debated ordinance regulating homelessness in public spaces was adopted.

Councilor Karen Liot Hill, a member of the Governance Committee, has had ample experience in hiring city managers; she is now preparing to embark on the fourth search in her 12-year tenure on the council. “This is not an ideal situation for the city to be in,” she understated, “so I think it’s important we get this right.”

Indeed it is. There are costs to the city when things don’t work out — Luttrell was entitled to a lump sum payment equal to six months of his $125,000 annual salary — and costs to the employee as well. Luttrell, for example, bought a $360,000 house to comply with the city’s residency requirement. Most important, continuity and consistency of approach are vital attributes in good municipal management, as Greg Lewis, Luttrell’s highly regarded predecessor, demonstrated in his four years on the job. Those values are undermined by frequent turnover.

What are the lessons to be learned from the search that ended in the hiring of Luttrell? One is the need for more comprehensive vetting of candidates and their employment backgrounds. It emerged after Luttrell’s dismissal that apparently no one from Lebanon had contacted his most recent employer, the members of the Selectboard in Somerset, Mass., to find out why they had voted not to renew his contract. Another lesson to be drawn is that the advice and recommendations of city department heads and other key personnel should be sought, something that inexplicably did not occur the last time. The information they can provide to candidates and their assessments of the applicants’ strengths and weaknesses could be invaluable in ensuring a good match.

And finally, what’s the downside of getting some public input when finalists are identified? Yes, it’s possible that making public the names of finalists might shrink the pool of applicants slightly, but that’s a risk well worth running, given that city residents are the ones with the biggest stake in finding an effective and long-serving manager. Opening up the process also might identify priorities that the council has overlooked or undervalued, as well as give the candidates a better feel for the community they would be serving.